And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

ColinWright

Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329384 Submitted many hours earlier, fewer upvotes, one comment, sank without trace.

jameskilton

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustworthy without consequence to ruin a good thing. So no you can't build a system that's meets all of the article's criteria because almost all of them rely on the unspoken rule of trust in civil society. Everything built for good can be abused for evil.

jMyles

> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals: There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state. The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central republic structure because it's too difficult to coordinate disparate statehouses via horseback with every little intrastate decision) is solved by dint of instant communication and long-term data retention. So it is with every other claim in favor of these huge legacy state structures. In this age, there is no longer any state needs to be larger than say, 1500 square km - about the size of a large county. This way, people can flee on foot to an adjacent state if needed, and no state can possibly control enough infrastructure to force Vodaphone to send such nauseating propaganda. We need the elder statesmen in the room to read the writing on the wall and begin this process.

Frieren

> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in? Legally, to the rules of the country. That is not even a question. But if we talk about morality, the answer is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what it implies. There is no moral nor legal reason to follow the parent company when it in conflict with the rule of law. People are starting to attribute to corporations a power that they do not have, and that is very dangerous. (The article is good, thou, and opens a lot of interesting questions)

mlsu

Technology is, of course, downstream of society. We have treated government with a startling glibness, a deep unseriousness. At the end of the day, the government can kill you and your entire family, and the only thing that can stop them from doing that are the laws of civil society. It is incredibly serious. Unfortunately, we have been unserious going on several decades. They have realized that the front door is unlocked and the gleaming glowing beating heart of civic power is sitting right there completely unprotected. There were warnings after 9/11, with the patriot act and the GWOT. People who raised these concerns were dismissed as cranks but in fact they were the only serious people in the room. The unseriousness has increasingly accelerated in the last 10 years. Now we are seeing the consequences. There's a timely acronym for this I think. FAFO?

djoldman

> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals: > Rapid sending of messages > Careful checking of the content of messages > Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area > Inability to mistakenly send a test message > Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending > Resilient enough to work after significant damage to infrastructure > That networks have the ability to vet and ignore > That networks are compelled to send > Which can only be used for good > And cannot be used for evil. Considering the last two, I'm assuming this must be tongue-in-cheek. I think that the best approach for public utilities is to design them in such a way as to minimize, or preclude if possible, their ability to choose their customers or level of service. We want them to have a set of rules/instructions, written beforehand and publicly available, that everyone can point to after an event that says, "well, those were the things they were supposed to do, so they did them." The entities that write the set of rules are separate from the utility: the utility solely exists to implement the rules/instructions as efficiently as possible. There's obviously a reasonableness factor here: it's impossible to foresee all situations. The effort spent on specifying exactly what should be done should be proportional to the potential impact of that possible decision.

cjs_ac

Technology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.

logifail

Last week I had boarded a flight at LHR and the crew were just starting their safety briefing when everyone's phones went off with that wildfires 'emergency' alert message. I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.

hollow-moe

I heard stories from friends where such a system is used to broadcast ads to wide areas in South Korea, never had to deal with it myself but the way they described it made it sound like they were sent using that very same emergency message system.

JuniperMesos

I agree that there's no difference in principle between the government of the land you live on ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to everyone about wildfire danger; and ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country. This is simply what it means for a national government to exist at all - a local monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in order to enforce the law. Everything a government does, from laws regulating food ingredient labeling to collecting the social security tax from paychecks to organizing a formal military to fight a rebellion, is ultimately backed up by men with guns telling people what to do.

laughing_man

It's really difficult to see what technologies will be enablers of state power. IMO, the techs ushering in 1984-levels of control are wifi, cheap cameras, and LLMs. The three technologies on their own are beneficial, but taken together they're going to make Big Brother seem impotent.

tonymet

no amount of rules will correct for bad people

asaucerful

I read this up until the movie trope and statement along the lines of "you can martyr youraelf but someone less moral will give in" but I'd say it's more likely they'll just find someone who voted for the other guy with the same knowledge as you. Why waste the bullet?

raincole

> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in? If Trump administration/US congress told you to use your AI agent to eavesdrop their political enemies should you be loyal to them? To kill children in middle east? To help them in a war against your mother country? When the rulers of countries and corporations conspire, the amount of evil they can do is unlimited. Thus, I believe the willingness of corporations to stand against the rulers is the cornerstone of a civilized society.

skybrian

The only way around this is to not to have any employees in the same country as the men with the guns.

decimalenough

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

excalibur

> What if armed thugs are sent in and the choice is send the message or die? Arm yourselves. Not just one person, arm your entire staff. IMO the most appealing option in this situation is to shoot the thugs in the face. (Ha ha, you're in the UK, I know.)

aidenn0

> it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. So: microphones, tape recorders, radios, television, and even the printing press are all bad civic hygiene? They have all been used to facilitate police states...

ruifjfj274

It’s time like these that I wish technologists didn’t devalue social scientists so much as to effectively alienate them from forums like this. Comments on these subjects are far less enlightening than when I want to know how to operate the latest LLM. Tech has gone some distance from when jobs put the early Apple teams together and stated that he thought everyone would be exceptional in their field without computers, it just so happens that computers help them achieve results in their field. It feels like computers became a field so vast, powerful, that it can sustain itself economically whilst alienating the very people that connect it to societies and the issues faced by them That is to say, I wish we had expert sociologists on this forum who can add value just as we have people who can with their slice of technology

fragmede

I think answer in this day and age, is to invoke Skynet, and give an LLM control of the system. Glue a local model that works without Internet to it, and give it guard rails, and give it a bunch of system instructions defining the rules on what to let though. It wouldn't be perfect, but what system is?